MS Now’s Joe Scarborough has skewered Pete Hegseth’s priorities as the Secretary of Defense.
The Morning Joe host is slamming Hegseth for obsessing over DEI while American sailors are starving on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East—a failure he says should have already gotten him canned.
“This was abysmal planning, and any other Secretary of Defense would have been fired by now,” he said in a fiery tirade on Thursday. “I’m not sure why he’s still there.”
Trump, 79, has stuck by Hegseth even amid reports that the military is running dangerously low on defensive munitions needed to fend off Iranian strikes and as conditions have become so dire on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier that troops are reportedly trying to jump overboard.
Scarborough, a former Republican representative who served on the Armed Services Committee, was particularly incensed that Hegseth is still pushing his “warrior ethos” and traveling to photo ops while service members actively serving in a war zone are treated like “trash.”
“This is what happens when you have a defense secretary that’s obsessed about the color of people’s skin, whether somebody is a man or a woman, testosterone levels, this obsession over DEI, and and and that’s all we ever hear about,” he said. “And what we’re not hearing about is, well, the basics. The basics always start with readiness.”
He continued, “Readiness is men and women of the United States military militarily ready to go into combat if called upon. And this is the exact opposite of what you do to make sure that they are prepared and ready to go, and this doesn’t have anything to do with toughness or this or that or the other.”
The Lincoln, filled with 5,000 sailors and Marines, has entered its ninth month at sea with supplies running thin. Loved ones of sailors have sounded the alarm about toilet problems, closed laundries, and shockingly poor rations.
Conditions are so dire that some military spouses have told the Military Times that sailors are attempting to take their own lives. Others shared texts with MeidasTouch claiming that the ship is unable to get any fresh rations, like milk, and that even some once-frozen meat arrives rotten.
The ship’s deployment began in November and was due to end in May, making its current service the longest of a U.S. carrier in the modern era. There is no set date for the ship to return to its home base in San Diego, California.
“We have our sailors being treated like third-class citizens,” Scarborough said. “Treated like trash, actually. So we’re not taking care of job one, which is again military readiness, and secondly, we’re not even able to keep count of the munitions that we have. Pete Hegseth’s DOD has run out of munitions to fight a hot war with Iran that Pete Hegseth told the president we should start.”
Scarborough appeared dumbfounded that Hegseth has not altered his public persona amid the crisis.
“He’s sitting around talking about testosterone levels and doing all these stupid promo videos that are supposed to make him look tough, obsessing over somebody whether somebody’s black or white,” Scarborough said.
He added, “We hear for years, oh my God, they’re too concerned about DEI. It’s getting in the way of the mission. No, it’s just the opposite. It’s Pete Hegseth who is so obsessed with the color of somebody’s skin, or whether it’s a man or a woman who’s doing the mission, or whether the person is black or white—[someone] that’s doing extraordinary things to protect and defend the United States of America. He’s so obsessed over the little things that readiness is falling by the wayside.”
